Samuel Alito’s Mysterious Absence From Supreme Court Raises Questions

Samuel Alito was again absent from the Supreme Court on Friday after skipping out on Thursday. No information has yet been provided by the court for Alito’s mysterious absence, which comes as the court is issuing decisions before the end of its term and leaves nothing but questions on his whereabouts.

Is he combating a hangover from a particularly raucous flag day with Martha-Ann? Is he ducking out to delay the decision on Trump’s presidential immunity case?

Alito’s absence poses the possibility that the Supreme Court will have to extend its term into July to complete its decisions for the term. One major case waiting in the wings is a decision on presidential immunity, which will decide if former presidents can extend immunity protections after they leave office—a determination that would greatly benefit Trump in his federal election interference case, currently still on hold.

The most conservative justice on the bench, Alito’s absence hasn’t stopped his name from appearing on Supreme Court decisions. This week, he helped ensure that U.S. citizens can’t sue over their spouses’ visa denials, or in the case of Smith v. Arizona,
declared the court had dealt a “crippling wound on modern evidence law.” Wherever he is, he’s still turning in his homework and is as dramatic as ever.

On Friday, Donald Trump boasted that Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was personally invited by Trump to speak at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July, and had, to the confusion of many, accepted the invitation.

“Our GREAT convention will unify Americans and demonstrate to the nation’s working families they come first,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, announcing O’Brien’s attendance. “When I am back in the White House, the hardworking Teamsters, and all working Americans, will once again have a country they can afford to live in and be respected around the world.”

The news initially provoked skepticism, as the Teamsters have never spoken at the RNC before, and Trump’s pro-billionaire politicking and history of being a scab don’t really align with the blue-collar union, or any union for that matter. The Teamsters released a statement confirming the booking—adding they were waiting on an invite by the Democratic National Convention to do the same.

“General President Sean O’Brien asked to speak at both the RNC and DNC, and we are very happy former President Trump has extended this invitation,” a statement from a Teamsters spokesperson read. “Our 1.3 million members represent every political background, and their message needs to be heard by as wide an audience as possible, and that includes all political candidates running for office.”

O’Brien was elected general president of the Teamsters in 2022. Throughout the 2024 election cycle, O’Brien’s Teamsters have made a series of moves that have provoked upset and confusion among its traditionally Democrat-leaning ranks. The Teamsters met with five candidates for president in December—none major contenders—before donating $45,000 to both the DNC and RNC in December 2023 and January of this year, respectively. In early January, O’Brien met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Later that month, the Teamsters executive board held a roundtable with Trump in D.C., which sparked a cascade of backlash. Executive board member John Palmer, who was invited to attend the meeting and rejected the invitation, issued a letter to O’Brien calling Trump a “known union buster, scab, and insurrectionist.” The Teamsters reportedly invited Biden to a similar meeting to take place the same day, but that meeting didn’t take place until mid-March.

The Teamsters have traditionally endorsed Democratic candidates for president, according to AP’s VoteCast. Teamsters endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, who has touted himself as “the most pro-labor president in American history.”

“There’s always a threat to organized labor, so we want to be proactive and make certain every candidate—not just President Biden—understands how important our issues are,” O’Brien said, after meeting with Biden in March. With Trump’s personal invitation for O’Brien to speak at the RNC, it’s now up to Biden whether O’Brien will be invited to speak at the DNC.

Donald Trump is trying to get the strongest evidence against him in his classified documents case thrown out: the memos written by his former lawyer Evan Corcoran.

The former president and convicted felon’s legal team is expected to ask Judge Aileen Cannon next week to remove the prosecution’s access to memos made by Corcoran, according to The Guardian. The memos note what Trump and his lawyer discussed regarding Trump complying with a court order to search his Mar-a-Lago estate for the missing classified documents.

According to the memos, after Trump received the court’s subpoena, he said to Corcoran, “Well, what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and “Well, look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

Trump’s federal indictment alleged that Trump had his employees (and now co-defendants) Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira move 64 boxes from a storage room to his residence so he could go through them, but only return 30 boxes back to the room where Corcoran would conduct his search. Corcoran would find 38 classified documents there, and Trump reportedly asked him, “Did you find anything? ... Is it bad? Good?” and then made a plucking motion to suggest “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, pluck it out.”

Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue that the memos don’t fit under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege and that chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., should not have allowed them as evidence. And Cannon has been particularly receptive to Trump requests, agreeing to hear pretrial motions that have slowed down proceedings, throwing out parts of the case, and postponing the trial indefinitely.

The Trump-appointed judge, who had minimal trial experience prior to taking the classified documents case, turned down offers from more senior and experienced judges to take over the case. Her actions have drawn criticism, even from one of Trump’s former lawyers, who has called her a “partisan prima donna.” And that’s exactly what Trump wants.

Lauren Boebert has not yet won the Republican nomination in Colorado’s 4th district, but that hasn’t stopped a Democratic challenger from blasting her for her infamous behavior at a performance of Beetlejuice in Denver.

John Padora, a Democrat running to replace Republican Representative Ken Buck in the district, has wasted no time going after Boebert, the best-known candidate in next week’s Republican primary. His new advertisement, recorded at a similar angle to the security camera that captured her vaping and groping her date in the middle of the musical, is going viral.

“I’m sitting in the very same seat Lauren Boebert got kicked out of, the same way she got kicked out of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Now she’s picked up her bags and fled to eastern Colorado,” Padora says in the fundraising spot.

Boebert announced she would not run for reelection in the 3rd district after eking out a reelection victory in 2022 and then being outraised by a Democratic challenger and losing the endorsement of several prominent district Republicans for the upcoming election. She fled to the redder 4th district—but her date-night hijinks seem to have followed her, and Padora is taking full advantage.

“Boebert’s an opportunistic carpetbagger, and we deserve real leadership here in Colorado’s 4th,” Padora says.

Of all of Boebert’s transgressions that Padora might have seized on—promoting the QAnon conspiracy, engaging in election denialism, giving customers at her open-carry restaurant diarrhea by serving them tainted pork—accusing her of carpetbagging seems, if anything, tame.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced Thursday night that he plans to sue the state of New York in retaliation for Donald Trump’s criminal conviction. The conservative AG vowed to “restore the rule of law”—but not the ones that found Trump guilty, of course—and deemed Trump’s hush-money trial “unconstitutional lawfare.”

But it doesn’t seem like Bailey understands the law in New York at all, and it doesn’t look like he’s paid much attention to the details of Trump’s hush-money trial. According to Axios, Bailey is pursuing his lawsuit against New York on the basis that the statute of limitations for misdemeanor business records falsification expired in 2019.

There’s just two big hiccups with Bailey’s argument: Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts, not misdemeanors, and the statute of limitations for those felonies is five years after the start of criminal proceedings—not two like with misdemeanors. It’s also unclear where Bailey is getting 2019 as a statute of limitations from: The federal criminal proceedings against Trump kicked off in 2018 after an explosive Wall Street Journal story stated Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels in 2016. The FBI soon raided Cohen, who that same year pleaded guilty to giving hush-money payments to Daniels and another woman, claiming he did so on Trump’s behalf. State criminal proceedings based on Cohen’s testimony formally began in August 2019, four years before Trump was indicted and five years before he was convicted, all of which fall well within New York’s five-year statute of limitations.

Whether Bailey is just bad at math, the law, or keeping up to date on Trump trial chaos ultimately matters little. His lawsuit represents a new wave of attacks that can be best described as, to use Bailey’s wording, “unconstitutional lawfare” being carried out in retaliation for Trump’s conviction. In his rush to preen himself as the ultimate pro-Trump attorney general (during an election year where he’s running against a member of Trump’s legal team), Bailey may soon find himself falling flat on his face: It doesn’t seem Bailey bothered to look into New York’s extremely strong anti-SLAPP laws, which prohibit against retaliatory lawsuits attempting to impede against public participation of matters of public interest. And convicting a former president certainly constitutes a matter of public interest.

Trump ally Matt Schlapp is poking the bear—or should we say, the Beast.

Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, took to social media Friday to taunt the Daily Beast over the reported exit of its new D.C. bureau chief, Martin Pengelly, who joined the embattled outlet only recently.

In his post, Schlapp tagged the Beast’s senior political reporter Roger Sollenberger, who in January 2023 was the first to publish anonymous allegations that Schlapp had sexually assaulted Carlton Huffman, a former campaign staffer for Herschel Walker.

Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, have since crusaded against the Beast, calling it “Satan’s publication to persecute Christians and their families.”

Sollenberger has continued to rigorously document the subsequent sexual battery and defamation lawsuit against Schlapp, and when it was dropped earlier this year, the reporter revealed that it was because Schlapp had paid Huffman $480,000 to do so, through the ACU’s insurer.

And Friday was no exception, with Sollenberger hitting back hard at Schlapp’s post on X, formerly Twitter, toasting Pengelly’s exit.

“Life’s a real bitch,” Schlapp wrote, tagging Sollenberger. He may yet live to regret the popcorn bucket emoji he added, as Sollenberger was quick to respond.

“Heard about your wedding. Heard about the DC parties in the 90s. Heard about the Meatpacking District,” Sollenberger wrote. “Why didn’t you run for Senate in 2020?”

“I can keep going,” he continued in a separate post.

“Matt is saying this knowing full well what was in our first comment request and apparently does not give a damn about the restraint we’ve shown him,” Sollenberger wrote in another tweet.

It seems that Sollenberger has plenty of dirt to drop, and the disgraced conservative lobbyist might do well to remember that.

The co-author of a bill mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed inside public school classrooms in Louisiana took to cable news for her victory lap after the measure was signed into law. Needless to say, her justifications for the blatant violation of religious freedom crumbled under the most basic scrutiny.

On two different CNN programs, Louisiana state Representative Lauren Ventrella trotted out the same defense. “Boris, I bet you CNN pays you a lot of money, and I bet you’ve got a bunch of dollar bills in that wallet,” she told anchor Boris Sanchez, who was floored by her apparent non sequitur. “I got a dollar bill in my wallet. ‘In God We Trust’ is written on that dollar. It is not forcing anybody to believe one viewpoint; it’s merely posting a historical reference on the wall.”

When Sanchez pointed out Ventrella’s ahistoricism, she retreated into crime-wave fearmongering: “This nation has gotten out of hand, with crime, with the bad, negative things that are going on. Why is it so preposterous that we would want our students to have the option to have some good principles instilled in them?” she said.

Sanchez asked what she would tell parents, students, and teachers of different faiths who objected to the commandments’ mandatory classroom presence, and Ventrella’s mask slipped. “Don’t look at it,” she replied.

The Republican lawmaker repeated her dollar bill argument during an interview with Abby Phillip Thursday night. “Look, ‘In God We Trust’ is on the dollar bill. If I had one right, I’d show you,” she said.

Phillip reminded Ventrella that the phrase did not appear on dollar bills until the 1950s and does not represent an original document comparable to the Constitution, from which references to God are absent.

“Well, it’s still on our dollar bill, no matter how you want to look at it,” Ventrella shot back.

Ventrella then laid bare the mechanisms by which Christian nationalists, cloaked in religious liberty and “good principles,” hope to install their broadly unpopular agenda. “You have to remember,” she told Phillip, “this is a new bench.”

“The Lemon decision was completely different. Now, it is a different bench,” she said, referring to a previous Supreme Court precedent that banned religious displays in publicly funded schools—and blatantly rejecting the very idea of precedent.

Minoritarian institutions like the conservative-majority Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals have been shown to dispense with precedent when conservative lawmakers knowingly bring unconstitutional laws up through the courts until they find a friendly one. Ventrella, after struggling to articulate a convincing alternative defense, just gave away the game.

Donald Trump is still awaiting sentencing after being convicted in his hush-money trial, but he thinks that means his gag order should be lifted. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg vehemently disagreed Friday.

In an emphatic brief, Bragg took Trump and his legal team to task, pointing out bomb threats made to two people involved in the case, as well as an avalanche of other threats to the district attorney and his employees. The New York Daily News reported Thursday that the D.A.’s office has received more than 100 threatening emails, including several with racial slurs.

Bragg also called out Trump for lying, saying that his motion to drop the gag order “includes a number of categorically false assertions.”

“For example, defendant claims that the District Attorney is acting in concert with defendant’s electoral opponent and an unspecified ‘cast of associates’ in an effort to restrict defendant’s speech at an upcoming presidential debate,” the brief stated. “Defendant offers no factual basis for this assertion, and there is none: this claim is a lie.” Bragg has thrown Trump a bone, though: He asked that the restriction on criticizing witnesses be lifted.

Trump’s gag order in his hush-money trial came after he repeatedly attacked not only prosecutors but witnesses, Judge Juan Merchan, and the judge’s daughter. He repeatedly violated the order, racking up fines totaling $10,000 and a warning from Merchan that he’d go to jail upon further infractions. Trump still criticized prosecutors after the warning, and even got some of his political supporters to make attacks on his behalf.

Why does Trump think he needs to attack prosecutors, jurors, and judges to mount a presidential campaign? It could be paranoia, fed by ongoing cognitive decline.

Donald Trump’s former ally took Judge Aileen Cannon to task after a shocking new report showed that she’s been fighting to protect the former president in his classified documents case since it first landed on her desk.

Cannon refused early calls from senior federal judges to hand off Trump’s classified documents case, according to a new report from The New York Times Thursday, making it clearer than ever that she has been determined to help the former president from the beginning.

Case in point: Cannon was set to begin a multiday hearing Friday to determine the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to the classified documents case, simply because Trump requested one.

Ty Cobb, a former lawyer in Trump’s White House, wasn’t having any of it.

In an interview on CNN Thursday night, he told Erin Burnett that the hearing is unlikely to remove Smith from the case, since “the law requires that she validate Jack Smith’s appointment, and not disqualify him.”

“The jurisprudence on this goes back to 1988 when the Independent Counsel statute, which preceded special counsel appointments … was fully vetted in the Supreme Court and upheld,” explained Cobb.

“The worst thing that could happen to her is that she actually does rule for Trump on this, because that would go to the Eleventh Circuit, and then I think this petty, partisan prima donna would be put in her place, and they would remove her,” the lawyer said.

Cobb called Cannon’s willingness to acquiesce to Trump’s requests “silly” and “shocking,” and said her actions go “way beyond” just being inexperienced. “The reality is, she is slow. And she’s slow on purpose,” he said.

Cobb has repeatedly spoken out against the former president, previously saying Trump “poses the gravest threat to American democracy that we’ve ever seen.” Cobb also signed onto a brief to the Supreme Court challenging Trump’s claim to presidential immunity.

He’s also been one of Cannon’s strongest critics. Last month, Cobb said the judge was “incapable of ruling intelligently,” and previously called her decision to consider the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment “ludicrous,” “ridiculous,” “dangerous,” and “incendiary.”

In a ruling delivered Friday, the Supreme Court decided 6–3 that U.S. citizens have no constitutional interest in their noncitizen spouses being able to enter the United States—despite the fact that a married person has an inherent interest in their spouse being able to live in the same country as they do. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned the ruling is an obvious sign the court will seek to overturn protections for marriage equality next.

Sotomayor issued a dire warning in her dissent, accusing the conservative supermajority of chipping away at constitutional protections for married couples and saying they’re making “the same fatal error” as they did in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal abortion protections.

“The majority, ignoring these precedents, makes the same fatal error it made in Dobbs: requiring too ‘careful [a] description of the asserted fundamental liberty interest,’” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s failure to respect the right to marriage in this country consigns U.S. citizens to rely on the fickle grace of other countries’ immigration laws to vindicate one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ and live alongside their spouses.”

The case involved Sandra Muñoz, a U.S. citizen whose husband was denied a visa by the U.S. consulate in El Salvador. That denial came from a broad provision in U.S. immigration law that disqualifies a person from obtaining a visa if the consulate knows “or has reasonable ground to believe” that a person is trying to enter the U.S. “to engage solely, principally, or incidentally in” unlawful activity. Her husband was denied because of tattoos he has, which a court-appointed gang tattoo expert later determined were not gang-related.

Muñoz sued the State Department, arguing that her husband’s inexplicable denial of entry into the U.S. infringed on her constitutional liberty interest in her husband’s visa application and their inability to start a life together in the U.S. In upholding the denial, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices decided not just that the State Department doesn’t need to provide reason for denying a visa but that a citizen’s right to be married doesn’t supersede the state’s strict, and often questionable, immigration processes. The conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court’s ruling chips away at the core of Obergefell v. Hodges—the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015—which decided that citizens have a right to marriage.

In her dissent, Sotomayor cast urgent warnings on the impact of restricting who is allowed to be married in the U.S., noting that the conservative decision will extend to couples “like the Lovings and the Obergefells, [who] depend on American law for their marriages’ validity.”

“Same-sex couples may be forced to relocate to countries that do not recognize same-sex marriage, or even those that criminalize homosexuality,” Sotomayor added. “Obergefell rejected what the majority does today as ‘inconsistent with the approach this Court has used in discussing [the] fundamental rights’ of ‘marriage and intimacy.’”

“Despite the majority’s assurance two Terms ago that its eradication of the right to abortion ‘does not undermine … in any way’ other entrenched substantive due process rights such as ‘the right to marry,’ ‘the right to reside with relatives,’ and ‘the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children,’ the Court fails at the first pass,” Sotomayor wrote in dissenting the conservative supermajority’s decision issued on Friday.